How much should DCs dad pay?

[HowMuchHowMuch]

I’ll start by adding context.

We have two children together aged 2 & 3, both of whom have different disabilities. Firstborn was born in 2021 and our second was born in 2022. For various different reasons, their dad gave minimal amounts of money (£50 here, £100 there) each month until Dec 2023 when he finally gain employment.

Since then he’s been giving me £400-£450 each month. I haven’t asked for a specific amount but I think he gives so much because 1) he can afford too and 2) he’s making up for years of lost time. Come September, we’ll be starting a set routine where I have the children from Sunday night - Friday morning and he’ll have them for Friday & Saturday night.

He hasn’t mentioned anything about reducing the amount he gives me but I can see that he’ll be well within his rights to do so. Especially now that he’ll actually need to buy clothes, food etc for them during their time with him. How much do you guys think is a reasonable amount to drop his contribution too? This could be a completely non issue as he may not but it’s been running through my mind so I wondered what was reasonable!

Sorry, I also forgot to add. He’s a HCA that lives at home with his mum. She doesn’t ask him to pay a substantial amount of rent (£50 or so) so he has roughly £1300 left to himself after giving me £450 a month. He has no bills other than a £100 phone bill which includes an iPad too

You can estimate what the government would order him to pay here: https://www.gov.uk/calculate-child-maintenance. That's generally regarded as the bare minimum, though, quite a lot less than extra costs the resident parent actually incurs. Some people do the government figure, plus splitting things like costs of hobbies, childcare costs, school uniform, school trips, etc. 50-50.

I would also think twice about establishing a pattern where he has them every weekend. I don't know what your working pattern is right now, but in a couple short years, the children will be at school, and you'll be doing all the rushing around weekday routine (and him doing none of it) and never getting the fun weekend time with your children. Every other weekend plus one night in the middle of the week is a common way of getting the same number of nights but a fairer pattern, if you live close enough together for that to be practical.

@skkyelark he gives me much more than what CMS requires him to pay so it wouldn’t make sense to use that as a comparison. Thank you for your comment though.

I just wondered what kind of numbers people would be happy with in our situation really!

I’ll be honest, if he has pretty much nothing to pay in the way of bills and £1300 money left over each month to spend at his leisure, I would expect him to keep the amount the same. Given you will almost certainly be the one covering all the day to day expenses of raising children, like school uniforms, lunches, childcare during the week, school trips, etc.

He will have some extra expenses for fun days out at the weekend, but he has ample money for treating the kids.